ANOTHER ODD NUMBER
Fannie expressed to Barbara one day her annoyance at that kind of men—without implying that she meant any certain one—who will never take no for an answer.
"A lover, Barb, if he's not of the humble sort, is the most self-conceited thing alive. He can no more take in the idea that your objection to him is he than a board can draw a nail into itself. You've got to hammer it in."
"With a brickbat," quoth Barbara, whose notions of carpentry were feminine, and who did not care to discuss the matter. But John March, it seemed, would not take no from fate itself.
"I don't believe yet," he mused, as he rode about his small farm, "that Jeff-Jack will get her. She's playing with him. Why not? She's played with a dozen. And yet, naturally, somebody'll get her, and he'll not be worthy of her. There's hope yet! She loves me far more than she realizes right now. That's a woman's way; they'll go along loving for years and find it out by accident—You, Hector! What the devil are you and Israel over in that melon-patch for instead of the corn-field?
"I've been too young for her. No, not too young for her, but too young to show what I can do and be. She waited to see, for years. The intention may not have been conscious, but I believe it was there! And then she got tired of waiting. Why, it began to look as though I would never do anything or be anybody! Great Cæsar! You can't expect a girl to marry an egg in hopes o' what it'll hatch. O let me make haste and show what I am! what I can—'Evermind, Israel, I see you. Just wait till we get this crop gathered; if I don't kick you two idle, blundering, wasting, pilfering black renters off this farm—as shore's a gun's iron!
"No, she and Jeff-Jack'll never marry. Even if they do he'll not live long. These political editors, if somebody doesn't kill 'em, they break down, all at once. Our difference in age will count for less and less every year. She's the kind that stays young; four years from now I'll look the older of the two—I'll work myself old!"
A vision came to the dreamer's fancy: Widewood's forests filled with thrifty settlers, mines opened, factories humming by the brooksides, the locomotive's whistle piercing the stony ears of the Sleeping Giant; Suez full of iron-ore, coal, and quarried stone, and Fannie a widow, or possibly still unwed, charmed by his successes, touched by his constancy, and realizing at last the true nature of what she had all along felt as only a friendship.
"That's it! If I give men good reason to court me, I'll get the woman I court!"—But he did not, for many weeks, give men any irresistible good reason to court him.
"Ah me! here's November gone. Talk of minutes slipping through the fingers—the months are as bad as the minutes! Lord! what a difference there is between planning a thing and doing it—or even beginning to do it!"